Books like Yoko — picked by fans

I’m a creature of habit. So is Scaredy Squirrel. We both know the comforts of feeling safe in perfect routines where nothing is left to chance, where nothing can go wrong…right?  

Scaredy writes lists of his emergency procedures, draws grids of his safety equipment, diagrams his secret exit strategies. I feel this poor squirrel’s pain. How many nights have I lain awake before a school visit mulling over my presentations? No plan is fool proof. So when Scaredy accidentally falls from his tree, he does what he must: thinks quickly and improvises. And discovers a secret ability he never knew he had. 

In the end, Melanie Watt gives Scaredy most of his old routine back, but now it’s balanced with a healthy dose of adventure. Perfectly balanced, I’d say.

This workbook has a wealth of helpful tips on how to deal with overwhelming anxiety. It’s written simply with great illustrations that really help littles figure out the scary world that surrounds them. I love the example of worries growing like tomato plants. If we want the worries to stop growing, we stop watering them! At the time my daughter was four and we had a huge over-producing tomato garden so this was a perfect illustration for both of us. We set up a time to talk about worries and we kept to that time limit. It helped both of us go through the anxiety instead of getting overwhelmed by it. There is no cure for anxiety and medication is not really an option for small children so dealing with it head-on was the only way that worked for us. This book really gave us both tools. It’s practical and… show more.

This is the sweetest little book. It’s super short with only 15 pages and only a simple sentence on every other page but the illustrations are adorable!! It’s about a snail and the narrator loves the snail. Each page reiterates their love and the illustrated snail is full of movement and character. I love the art style. It’s brushy and rushed but accurate and full of energy. I love the rhythm of the simple sentences. It’s fun and cute and perfect for reading aloud to a little. You can read it over and over and it never gets old.

When my daughter was afraid to go to kindergarten I would read it to her every day and tell her that I loved her like snaily snail. The last page says, “I love you when I work. I love you snaily snail!” and that really hit home for me because I… show more.

My Spice Girl-loving heart would have died to be in an SG fan club at my school. Back in my day, we had to settle for quick half-memorized dance routines under the monkey bars during recess. But in Akemi Dawn Bowman’s sweet story of niche interests and building a community person by person, the characters’ shared love of a music group is only the tip of a huge and fulfilling friendship iceberg. 

This sweet story brings me back to the rush of heady (albeit sometimes fleeting) infatuations and reminds me that simple friendship rules such as “Don’t let guys come between us” are not always as simple as they seem. The best part? Although Keiko ends up with the right romantic interest (there’s a scene that will melt your heart), she learns that self-love is paramount.

A government report that doesn’t read like a government report.

In 1980, the U.S. Congress voted to form the Commission to extensively research the Japanese American World War II experience and make recommendations to remedy past government actions.

This is the most extensive and comprehensive coverage of that period in American history, which includes lesser-known facts such as the U.S. government-arranged abductions of Japanese Latin Americans, and the forced evacuation of the indigenous of the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands in Alaska.

The Commission’s report led to the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, commonly known as “redress,” which mandated an apology and $20,000 each to living survivors of that experience.

This compilation has been my consistent go-to reference source, a mountain of research from which I have often excavated.

But the memoirs didn’t delve into the emotional and psychological impact of the forced removal and incarceration──until this unflinching one from 2005, and it’s another among the best.

Removed along with her family from their farm on Vashon Island, Washington and incarcerated at the Minidoka camp in Idaho, Matsuda Gruenewald, like most of those who underwent this experience, remained silent about what happened to them until she refused to be further confined by “the self-imposed barbed-wire fences built around my experiences in the camps.”

During a 2004 return to the Minidoka site, she wrote about her pilgrimage: “I had been saddled by feelings of paralyzing helplessness for so long. I wondered, Once I open up and start talking, will I also cry? And if I do so, will I be able to stop?”

While Snow Falling on Cedars also flashes back to Japanese internment camps on the West Coast during WWII, this fictional story centers around a suspicious drowning of a white man in 1954 and the trial of the accused Japanese American. Ishmael Chambers, a one-armed war veteran himself, runs the local newspaper and follows the trial closely as he has a close connection to the players. Ishmael not only grew up with the drowning victim and the accused, but he was also the high school sweetheart of Hatsue, the accused’s wife. A love he never got over. (If you are an Ethan Hawke fan the 1999 movie is also well done, but more of a courtroom thriller than the book.)

This beautiful, bittersweet novel tells the story of Katie; her sister, Lynn; and their brother, Sammy. Growing up in 1950s Georgia, in one of the few Japanese families in their town, the kids stand out and must struggle against prejudice, economic hardship, and Lynn’s eventual illness. What could be a bleak story is redeemed by Katie’s dry humor and the author’s portrayal of the deep bond between the children and within the family and the Japanese community. Lynn teaches Katie that however difficult life becomes, one must look for Kira-Kira—the things that glitter like the stars above. This book doesn’t flinch from hard topics: the labor conditions in the poultry industry, Lynn’s illness, racial prejudice. As a writer, I admire Kadohata’s willingness to tackle these issues and her faith that kids will learn from having such stories as part of their reading lives. 

Among fictional versions of the World War II camp experience, this one has been cited as, thus far, “the great camp novel.”

I consider it the “Apocalypse Now” of camp novels──a hallucinatory, abstract but visceral take on one family’s Berkeley to Topaz camp journey. Early in the story, as the Japanese American mother prepares to leave her home, and with families not allowed to take their pets with them, she kills their dog with a shovel and buries it in the backyard.

Written in short, clipped sentences, the novel continues with its highly original approach to this period in history.